Institute

Founded in 1994, the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (MPIWG) in Berlin is one of the more than 80 research institutes administered by the Max Planck Society. It is dedicated to the study of the history of science and aims to understand scientific thinking and practice as historical phenomena.

People

The Max Planck Institute for the History of Science comprises scholars across all Departments and Research Groups, as well as an Administration team, IT Support, Research IT Group, and Research Coordination and Communications team.

Publications & Resources

The Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (MPIWG) engages with the research community and broader public, and is committed to open access.

This section provides access to published research results and electronic sources in the history of science. It is also a platform for sharing ongoing research projects that develop digital tools.

Researchers at the Institute benefit from an internal Library service. The Institute’s research is also made accessible to the wider public through edited Feature Stories and the Mediathek’s audio and video content.

News & Events

The Max Planck Institute for the History of Science frequently shares news, including calls for papers and career opportunities. The Media & Press section highlights press releases and the Institute's appearances in national and global media. Public events—including colloquia, seminars, and workshops—are shown on the events overview.

“Data Not Good Enough to See the Light of the Day”: Shifting Boundaries Between Private and Public Experimental Data

The current era of "big data" and "data-driven science" is a result, not only of technological innovations, but also of a number of deep epistemological, social, cultural, and political transformation. In explaining the rise of "big data," standard narratives focus mainly, however, on the growing technological capacity, since the late twentieth century, to produce, store, and transmit data. In the experimental sciences, high-throughput technologies applied to genomics, proteomics, or crystallography, have indeed augmented the rate of data production. But for data to accumulate in public databases and thus become visible, it also has to be considered scientifically valuable and belonging to the public sphere. In this paper Bruno Strasser explores the shifting meaning of "data" in protein crystallography and its consequences on data accumulation. He argues that labeling something as "data" produces a number of obligations, most importantly, to make it public in case it has served as a basis for granting authorship. In crystallography, like elsewhere in science and beyond, the category of data has expanded, include information which were previously considered private, thus contributing to the accumulation of public data and to the making of the "big data" era.